Musings from the Penguin...

Monday Oct 21, 2013

We are excited to announce the general availability of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 for Oracle Linux 6. The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 (UEK R3) is Oracle's third major supported release of its heavily tested and optimized Linux kernel for Oracle Linux 6 on the x86_64 architecture.

UEK R3 is based on mainline Linux version 3.8.13. Some notable highlights of this release include:

Inclusion of DTrace for Linux into the kernel (no longer a separate kernel image). DTrace for Linux now supports probes for user-space statically defined tracing (USDT) in programs that have been modified to include embedded static probe points

Production support for Linux containers (LXC) which were previously released as a technology preview

Numerous driver updates in close coordination with our hardware partners

UEK R3 uses the same versioning model as the mainline Linux kernel version. Unlike in UEK R2 (which identifies itself as version "2.6.39", even though it is based on mainline Linux 3.0.x), "uname" returns the actual version number (3.8.13).

For further details on the new features, changes and any known issues, please consult the Release Notes.

The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 and related packages can be installed using the yum package management tool on Oracle Linux 6 Update 4 or newer, both from the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) and our public yum server. Please follow the installation instructions in the Release Notes for a detailed description of the steps involved.

Oracle Linux can be downloaded, used and distributed free of charge and updates and errata are freely available. For support,
you are free to decide which of your systems you want to obtain a
support subscription for, and at what level each system should be
supported. This makes Oracle Linux an ideal choice for your
development, testing and production systems - you decide which support
coverage is the best for each of your systems individually, while
keeping all of them up-to-date and secure.

Wednesday Oct 02, 2013

We are happy to announce the availability of the release candidate for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 for Oracle Linux 6. The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 (UEK R3) is Oracle's third major release of its heavily tested and optimized operating system kernel for Oracle Linux 6 on the x86_64 architecture. It is based on the mainline Linux version 3.8.13.

The release candidate version is 3.8.13-16 and includes additional improvements and bug fixes in preparation for our final release. As a recap, the features users can expect in this release include:

Inclusion of DTrace for Linux into the kernel (no longer a separate kernel image). DTrace for Linux now now supports probes for user-space statically defined tracing (USDT) in programs that have been modified to include embedded static probe points.

Improved support for Control Groups (cgroups) and Linux containers (LXC).

The ext4 file system can now store the content of a small file inside the inode (inline_data).

TCP fast open (TFO) can speed up the opening of successive TCP connections between two endpoints.

The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 can be installed on Oracle Linux 6 Update 4 or newer, running either the Red Hat compatible kernel or a previous version of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. The UEKR3 beta kernel packages and supporting userland utilities can be installed using the yum package management tool from the public-yum server.

For installation instructions and more details on the new features, changes and any known issues, please consult the Release Notes found on our public beta site.